Take Your Work Life Around the World With You

Do you long to leave your work life behind and travel the world, but you don’t have enough funds set aside to comfortably make a career break? Here’s some good news. You can travel as much as you like and recharge your personal batteries while keeping the money flowing into your bank account. How? Travel – not just as a vacation but as a lifestyle.

I’ve been living in and traveling through the Middle East since I left my home in the U.S. in mid 2010, doing freelance work most every step of the way. I’ve discovered that the world has sort of arranged itself into an arena easy to work your way through, particularly if your job is computer based as is mine. Ubiquitous internet throughout the world makes it a cinch to communicate with clients, upload and download files, pay bills and stay in close touch with family and friends. With the world tailor made to suit working travelers, why not give it a try?

When you take your work life on the road you’ll get to know various cultures from a different perspective than pure vacation would ever allow. Every time you step out the door for months or years on end you’ll be seeing and experiencing things you otherwise might never know. Each time I open my front door now in Dahab, Egypt I see a street made of sand with goats wandering by and camels lying around. Life is an adventure.

It is also a challenge. I don’t have a proper desk anymore and have had to adjust to work environments varying from the difficult – a bunk bed on a sleeper train chugging from Nha Trang to Hanoi, to the more enjoyable – a poolside lounge chair at the Hilton Hotel. I sometimes have to make myself available for work during my nighttime hours to coincide with work hours back home in the U.S. And I’ve found that communicating with people at home can be quite different than elsewhere in the world, which presents a bit of a challenge sometimes.

Giving up the stability of a normal work life for a traveling work life, although it has pro’s and con’s will also, I believe, be worth it in the long run.